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Chapter 10: Seeing Double

First thing: mind won’t help. Try to understand it: mind won’t help, it is the barrier. And the second thing: your over-concern about yourself is the greatest barrier. It has been my constant observation that people who meditate miss because they are concerned too much in themselves. They are too egocentric. They may pretend humbleness and they may even want to know how to be egoless, but they are the most egocentric people; they are only worried about themselves, they are only concerned with themselves.

To be worried about others is stupid; to be worried about oneself is even more stupid - because to be worried is stupidity; it makes no difference about whom you are worried. And people who are worried about others, you will feel they are always more healthy.

So in the West psychoanalysts help people to think about others and drop thinking about themselves. Psychologists go on teaching people how to be extroverts and not to be introverts, because an introvert becomes ill, an introvert becomes in reality perverted. He thinks continuously about himself, he becomes enclosed. He remains with his frustrations, worries, anxieties, anguish, depressions, anger, jealousy, hate, this and that - and he only worries. Think what type of anguish he lives in, continuously worried about things: Why am I angry? How should I become non-angry? Why do I hate? How should I transcend it? Why am I depressed? How to attain bliss? - he is continuously worried, and through this worry he creates the very same things he is worried about. It becomes a vicious circle.

Have you ever observed that whenever you want to go beyond a depression the depression deepens? Whenever you want not to be angry you become more angry. Whenever you are sad and you don’t want to be sad any more, more sadness descends on you - have you not observed it? It happens because of the Law of the Reverse Effect. If you are sad and you want not to be sad, what will you do? You will look at sadness, you will try to suppress it, you will be attentive to it - and attention is food.

Psychoanalysts have found a clue. That clue is not very meaningful in the end; it cannot lead you to reality, it can at the most make you normally unhealthy. It can make you adjusted - it is a sort of adjustment to the people around you. They say: Be concerned with others’ worries, help people, serve people.

Rotarians, members of Lions Clubs and others, they always say: We serve. Those are the extroverts. But you will feel that people who are in social service, those who are concerned with others and are less concerned with themselves are happier than people who are concerned too much with themselves.

Too much concern with oneself is a sort of disease. And then the deeper you move within - you are opening a Pandora’s Box: many things bubble up and there seems to be no end to it. You are surrounded by your own anxieties and you go on playing with your wounds, you go on touching them again and again to see whether they are healed or not. You have become a pervert.